Here's a great page about one of my favorite movies when I was a kid -- The Crawling Eye.

What I most remember isn't the film itself, but the eagerness with which my friends and I anticipated it, which is true for all my favorite monster/sf/horror movies from that era.

The trouble with movie monsters is that they eventually show their faces (or some part of themselves, if they don't have faces) and it's a big let down. You can always imagine something more horrifying, or, at any rate, imagine there must be something more horrifying, even if you can't quite picture it. Especially if you're ten years old.

My friends and I were disappointed when the aliens in The Crawling Eye finally emerged from their spooky cloud. The tentacled, one-eyed horrors weren't bad by the cinematic standards of the nineteen fifties. Which was to say they at least didn't resemble leaky bags of jello and you couldn't see any strings or scotch tape. But we had envisioned something better, or should I say worse? More like the aliens from the much later Alien movies, for example. Although by then, of course, we were all expecting creatures even more grotesque.

Again and again we'd go off to the movies or tune into some tv show, getting our hopes up, almost convincing ourselves that this time, finally, we'd be presented with a horror we could believe in, that actually looked real. Show us the monster! That was our motto. Show us the monster! But it never happened.

I wonder what our reaction would have been, if we'd had a twenty-first century special effects creature sprung on us?

Still, we had loads of fun imagining ourselves pursued by crawling eyes (you have to love the name) when we played aliens and spacemen.

The scariest picture I've ever seen was the original The Haunting. The movie makers had the good sense to never show the ghost.